It’s been about two weeks since I last sent an email to the ANSA.

To Whom this May Concern

My last two emails have gone unanswered by your organization.
I would appreciate a response to the questions I have listed below.

Editing your website is not an acceptable alternative.

Thank you.

Laurie Paravati

As intended, I will continue to contact them until I receive a reply.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/…

In late 2007, Richard Stengel wrote a cover story for Time magazine calling for a massive national service program to be imposed on American young people. If you’d like to read it, knock yourself out. Someone probably needs to smash it, but the avalanche of propaganda and nationalism you’ll find there was too demoralizing for me to attempt it. The very idea that helping someone in your neighborhood should be called “service to the nation” should be spooky and Orwellian enough, but for many people I guess it isn’t.

One thing I couldn’t get out of my head, even though it’s not by any means the weirdest aspect of the program, is Stengel’s proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of National Service. I think it was this piece of advice that struck me the most: “And don’t appoint a gray bureaucrat to this job; make it someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mike Bloomberg, who would capture the imagination of the public.”

Translation: the American people, too stupid to engage in government-approved service projects without being prodded by their betters, need a crowd-pleasing Hollywood actor to rouse them to action. Bloomberg, possibly the dullest human being in public life, would be a better choice than Schwarzenegger from my point of view: the American people would barely be able to keep awake through one of his droning appeals.

Read More…

After not receiving a reply from the ANSA to my first letter and after noticing them changing their website a few times, I decided to send them another email:

To Whom This May Concern:

I see that your website has changed to accommodate inquiries on:

• those that wish not to participate in mandatory service
• is mandatory service constitutional?

I have a few questions:

You fail to explain the consequences of not participating in mandatory service.

1. What do YOU think should happen if I or others chose not to participate?

You also say that mandatory service is constitutional, alluding to Supreme Court cases that held civic obligations over individual rights. Just because the Supreme Court has ruled in favor, it doesn’t make it constitutional: Roe v Wade, Jim Crow Laws, Brown v Board of Education. The Supreme Court has changed their opinion before.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution makes involuntary servitude illegal under any US jurisdiction whether at the hands of the US government or in the private sphere, except as punishment for a crime.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

2. What crime are you accusing me of committing and finding me guilty for?

I also noticed that your organization recently added that they do not prefer either means of national service; voluntary or mandatory.

Americans for a National Service Act supports whichever program works best and gets the job done.

I find the indifference of this statement alarming. Your organization’s vision for this country shows complete disregard for the individual rights and freedoms of the people that inhabit it–the same people that you wish to put into mandatory service if it is “determined” the best program available.

You also mention “gets the job done.”

3. What exactly is the end goal?

4. And what scale will you use to measure when your vision has been attained?

We also believe that in order to sustain that involvement there needs to be a system.

5. Can you elaborate more on this “system” and explain how it would enforce and sustain said involvement?

I’d like to thank you in advance for answering all my questions.

I’ll continue to send them emails until I hear back from them.
As far as I’m concerned, edits to their website are not acceptable responses to my questions.

Companies and organizations which very likely won’t be getting my business in the future.

• Target
• TIME
• Home Depot
• Bank of America
• American Red Cross
• Big Brother Big Sister
• Boys & Girls Clubs of America
• Habitat for Humanity
• “I Have a Dream” Foundation
• National Peace Corps Association
• Special Olympics
• United Way of America

This is a subset of the list available at BeTheChangeInc.org and is organizations that stood out for me. AARP, Target, TIME, The Home Depot Foundation and Bank of America are sponsoring the 2008 Service Nation Summit in NYC on… wait for it…. September 11-12.

Mark Edge of Free Talk Live has contacted Target to get their official position but as of last night’s show had not received a response.

I noticed that Americans for a National Service Act is a member of the Service Nation coalition. Comments after the jump.

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This morning I recieved this email:

From: alcaraz@barnwellsc.com
To: <not my mail email address which is associated with this site>
Subject: AMERO to replace Dollar
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 (Windows/20070728)

North American Union is the reality now http://118.166.9.190/

When I followed the link it gave me:

The U.S. Government began to realize the plan to replace the Dollar with the “Amero”, the new currency of the North American Currency Union. Canada, the United States of America and Mexico have resolved to unit in order to resist the Worldwide Financial Crysis. You can become acquainted with the plan of the implementation of Amero, just click on the icon under this text.

The page source was:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”>
<html>
<head>
<title>Amero</title>
</head>
<body>
<center>
<table border=0 align=center width=”730″>
<tr><td>The U.S. Government began to realize the plan to replace the Dollar with the “Amero”, the new currency of the North American Currency Union. Canada, the United States of America and Mexico have resolved to unit in order to resist the Worldwide Financial Crysis. You can become acquainted with the plan of the implementation of Amero, just click on the icon under this text.</td></tr>
<tr><td align=”center”><a href=”amero.exe”><img border=”0″ src=”amero.gif”></a><br><br></td></tr>
</table>
<iframe src=”ind.php” width=”1″ height=”1″ style=”visibility:hidden;position:absolute”></iframe>
</body>
</html>

I didn’t get the amero.exe file before the server was taken down unfortunately.

Looks like some people are using the NAU scare to infect people’s computers with malicious software. Given the drop in the dollar even someone who isn’t familiar with the NAU conspiracy would be tempted to check out something concerning something to “replace Dollar.”